Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [224]
Before the conclusion of the ceremony, there was one last formality to be gone through: ‘The Lord Shield-Bearer … repeated in a loud voice in the Public Assembly so that the said Brother Michael Angelo de Caravaggio being personally summoned once, twice, thrice and a fourth time, an abundant notice, did not appear nor as yet doth he appear …’ The oratory fell silent for the brief, necessary moment of Caravaggio’s inevitable non-appearance. Then the robe of a Knight of Malta, so proudly but so briefly worn by him, was stripped from the stool by Grand Master Wignacourt himself, and the last damning words were written in the record: ‘the said Brother Michael Angelo de Caravaggio was in the Public Assembly by the hands of the Reverend Lord President deprived of his habit, and expelled and thrust forth like a rotten and diseased limb from our Order and Society.’81
THE BURIAL OF ST LUCY AND A BLACK DOG CALLED CROW
Caravaggio was on the run for the second time in his life. His destination was the port town of Syracuse at the western edge of Sicily, where his old fellow apprentice, Mario Minniti, had established a thriving studio. Minniti had contacts in the town Senate. If they could be persuaded to look favourably on Caravaggio, they had the power to protect him from Maltese law. He had never been in more trouble than now. This time he had managed to alienate his entire network of supporters, not only the Colonna and their allies, who had manoeuvred to get him to Malta, but also the formidable Alof de Wignacourt and his army of knights. Caravaggio desperately needed some new friends in high places.
There is evidence that he took a deliberately circuitous route, landing at one of the island’s smaller and more southerly ports, such as Pozzallo or Scicli, before working his way north-east. En route, he stayed in the little town of Caltagirone, some sixty miles inland from Syracuse. A recently rediscovered eighteenth-century document records that Caravaggio was seen visiting a church there, Santa Maria di Gesù. He was impressed by the beauty of a sixteenth-century marble Madonna by Antonello Gagini on one of its altars. ‘Whoever wants her more beautiful, should go to heaven,’ he reportedly said.82 Caravaggio was continuing to measure himself, as he had done throughout his life, against the standard of Michelangelo and his school: Gagini had been one of Michelangelo’s most gifted pupils, and was said to have assisted the sculptor on his final version of the tomb of Pope Julius II, in the Roman church of San Pietro in Vincoli.
As the painter made his way from Caltagirone to Syracuse, he found himself once more within a realm ruled distantly by Philip III of Spain. The island had been praised for its warm climate and natural abundance since antiquity, but under the Spanish the majority of its people suffered great privations and hardship. Part of the reason was Spain’s own economic crisis, caused by the sudden dwindling of its vast revenues from the silver mines of Latin America, under the pressure of competition from other European nations. A succession of Spanish viceroys in Sicily were encouraged to bleed it of its natural resources. The people became poorer as their rulers enriched themselves, concealing the true nature of this unequal transaction behind the grandest of architectural façades. During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, cities such as Syracuse, Messina and Palermo became stage-sets for the performance of the rituals of absolute Spanish power. Splendid new churches and palaces were built in an extravagant local version of the Baroque style. Grand axial routes were ruthlessly cut through the fabric of Sicily’s medieval cityscapes, distracting attention from the miserable lot of the poor, and allowing the rich to move serenely through each city without ever seeing its warren of slums.
Travelling to Syracuse by land from the southern tip of Sicily was the best way